Eric Schmidt, CEO for search engine marketing giant Google, has reassured mobile companies that Google’s recent foray into the world of mobile technology is aimed at making money for the mobile operators themselves, rather than challenging their authority.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress, Schmidt faced a barrage of questions from those working in the mobile technology industry who believe that Google is attempting to capitalise on their successes with products such as the Android mobile phone.
The Guardian reports that Schmidt addressed these fears by stating that he is ”not trying to run rough shod over operators”. Schmidt commented on such accusations, saying: ”I feel very, very strongly that we depend on successful business for the operators globally and I disagree that we are trying to turn the operators into dumb pipes.”
Schmidt added that both parties would benefit from Google’s activity: ”Almost all of the interesting growth now is coming from mobile data, so both Google and the operators are growing because of this explosion in usage.”
Asked about whether he cared that the network operators may try to regain investment by engaging in deals with content operators, the Google CEO brought up the idea of ‘net neutrality’ – a concept which is being strongly debated in the US - calling for all traffic to be treated in an equal manner.
Schmidt commented that: ”Google defines net neutrality in the following way; if you have a content category like video, we want to make sure that operator doesn’t favour one video over another because that would then allow the operator to pick winners in the category.” However, he followed by saying that Google would not pay for such systems.
Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone was reported in Wireless to warn that Google was too powerful in its market and that regulators were likely to review companies such as Google with 70-80% market share, saying: ”I would like to have more competition everywhere – at the moment you have three players [Google, Bing and Yahoo] but only kind of one.” Colao added that it would be prudent for the European Commission to ”examine the whole value chain” surrounding search engine companies to ensure competition rules are adhered to.
Nevertheless, extending the olive branch as Schmidt did, Colao commented that ”I want to be clear we use Google, we like Google.”
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